Can America be Saved?

I'm working on a speech about our nation's future. I'm worried about it. The following is a first draft; it's discovery writing, so I am not totally sure I mean anything quite so confidently as I seem to state.

This is the only way I know how to create. I have to sort of go over the top initially and then review it when passion has subsided. Writing is an emotional event for me. The writing is not so much writing per se as just keeping track of and making a record of my experience as I ponder ideas.

Can America be Saved?


Have we lost our way? Have we forgotten our identity? Do we lack the
courage to be who we truly are?

I fear so. Today, we seem unable or unwilling to defend our borders, to enforce our laws, to protect our currency, to defeat Islamic terror, to teach our children how to read, write and think, to balance our budget or grow our economy. We can’t even take care of our seniors, who – despite years paying into Medicare and Social Security -- are burdened with a retirement system that must collapse within the next ten years.

We are experiencing the loss of our nation. America, by following government leaders who lack vision, is on the verge of tumbling into the ash pit of history. The most daring and successful social experiment in history is on the point of collapse. Like lemmings, we are marching mindlessly to our own doom.

We are standing idly by and allowing the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history to disintegrate. It’s not just the destruction of a nation with the highest standard of living ever achieved – although to the privileged elite who are destroying us that will be the central concern – it’s the death of the only nation in history which has sought not to expand as an
empire but to spread the blessings of freedom throughout the earth. The death of America is not just our loss, it is the world’s loss.

All humanity loses if America falls. The world’s greatest font of freedom is drying up and the flame held aloft by Liberty gutters and dims as darkness, gloom, fear and oppression gather around the failing light.

We are failing not only ourselves and the rest of the world but our children and their children – all posterity shall suffer. A thousand years shall pass before another such nation will rise.

If we allow this tragedy to occur, the United States of America will be a mere footnote in the pages of history, a note about a well meaning but failed enterprise. It was a country with great ideals but which proved incapable of the continuous renewing of devotion to those ideals which is the condition of continued greatness. Historians will reflect on an America that might have
been.

If we allow our country to fail, we are betraying both our future and our past. Think of the sacrifices of the amazing individuals who founded this nation.

Think of the blood spilled, the pain endured, all in vain, because we proved unfit to sustain the blessings passed on to us by our fathers. What a betrayal!

And what explains this vast faltering, this colossal failure? How do we go from the world’s essential superpower to a pale and feckless shadow of former greatness in the space of a single lifetime?

America stumbles and falls because of a failure of courage, a failure of will, a failure of vision. We have chosen leaders incapable of grandeur. In the great parade of human events, the mighty outmarching of destiny, they are organ grinders and clowns, charlatans and fools prancing and posturing while pretending to lead while fomenting the disintegration of the greatest nation in history, the loss of humanity’s last best hope.

Here and there appears a man of truth, but we have been betrayed by our leaders. They are cowards.

They are unwilling or unable to face frankly the frightening reality that the world tomorrow is missing freedom’s great champion. Some speak the truth – in whispers, in private – but above all they want the end to come on someone else’s watch. So, they wheedle and deal and compromise and prevaricate, speak not the full truth nor name honestly the dangers which
threaten our national survival.

One thing is certain: America shall survive only if she deserves to survive. And where is the evidence of our national merit today? What ideals do we yet represent? Is there a reason for our flag to fly proudly? Have we a cause our young men will rush forward to fight and die for?

Can we yet claim to be the land of the free and the home of the brave? I pray it is so, but I fear it is not.

The cost of freedom is the blood of the brave. If we fail to instill in the hearts of our young an unquenchable love for freedom and a deep yearning to live lives of truth, America must die. If we give them nothing worth dying for, they will have nothing to live for.

If we fail to give our youth an understanding of the greatness of our past, America has no future.
If we fail to sustain the nation of laws with which we were blessed by our forebears, then we leave our posterity not a gleaming temple of law but a black pit of chaos and doom.

The choice is ours. Who are we as a people? The ultimate consequence of our future revolves around the question of our identity. Who are we? Do we care enough to be courageous? Shall we betray our birthright? Or shall we rise up and show the world the goodness and might of a united people deserving to bear the name, American. The future of freedom is at our feet. We have but to dare to pick up that bright sword, lift up that shining beacon and show a world that needs us that America is not to die, not today. Not any day while men will lay down their life in the cause of freedom.

So, what do you think?

www.ourfinest.org